Short description
A seven-year-old English girl, washed up on the Wild Coast in about 1736, is adopted by the amaMpondo, grows up to become a woman of surpassing beauty, marries the chief of the clan and becomes an ancestor of many of the Xhosa royal families in the nineteenth century.
Long description
It sounds like the stuff of romance, but this is verified, documented fact. Her name was Bessie, but the amaMpondo named her Gquma – ‘The Roar of the Sea’ – and she won their affection for her compassion and generosity, and became famous for her love of personal adornment, covering herself with necklaces, beadwork, seashells and bangles. But she was no mere fashion-plate, winning renown for her wisdom, becoming involved in the politics of her adopted people.
Inspired by the story of Bessie, in The Sunburnt Queen, Hazel Crampton has delved deep into the history of the castaways from the many ships wrecked on this beautiful but perilous shore. In a highly entertaining way she tells their story, which became inextricably interwoven with those of the people of the Wild Coast: whole clans, such as the abeLungu (‘the White People’) trace their ancestry to castaways.
The book traces the lives of Bessie’s descendants and those of some of the other castaways. Their stories are intimately, often tragically intertwined in the sad history of contact between the Xhosa-speaking peoples. It discovers too the number of Xhosa-speaking royal families who absorbed white castaways into their gene pools and whose modern offspring would probably, with DNA testing, reveal interesting links with modern British, Portuguese and Dutch citizens. These stories are intimately and tragically intertwined with contact with white settlers and the devastation of the Mfecane.
She writes in a modern idiom that makes the narrative trip along effortlessly. Diligent research has provided an intimate knowledge of her characters that has enabled her to present them in such a lively way that they soon become old acquaintances.
The book is rich in anecdote and fascinating asides, such as the fact that Afrikaans was first written down in Arabic script and that the son of King Ngqika’s senior counsellor was married to a Scottish woman and all their children were educated in Edinburgh.
If there is a message to be gleaned from the story of Bessie it is this: We South Africans are far more alike than we are different and we all have so much more to gain by emphasizing our similarities rather than our differences, by cherishing our common heritage.